One of the trends in communications is toward providing enriched presence information to third parties regarding a user's availability. For example, H. Schulzrinne, “RPID: Rich Presence Extensions to the Presence Information Data Format (PIDF)”, RFC 4480, July 2006, describes extensions to presence models that enable dissemination of a user's “mood” and “activities”. Under such trends, third parties subscribing to a user's presence information may expect to receive a large quantity of data regarding the user.
Another trend in modern communications is toward the use of multiple devices for communications, and often for some of the same types of services. Many users have a home telephone, work telephone, one or more personal computers, one or more mobile devices, fax machines, and other such user devices. Any one of these user devices may provide multiples services. For example, a user may use his or her home telephone, work telephone, mobile devices, and, in some cases, personal computer to place or receive voice calls. In some cases those voice calls may be placed as conventional PSTN circuit-switched calls, cellular wireless calls, VoIP calls, etc., or combinations of these. Even VoIP calls may be made over different types of network connections, including WAN, WLAN, DSL, etc.
A complication that arises in the context of rich presence information with regard to multiple devices is that third parties may be given an excessive amount of information regarding the various devices on which the user may be available. This places the onus on the third party to decipher the presence information and select an appropriate device to which to direct a message or session request.
It would be advantageous to provide for improved methods and systems for simplifying presence in a multi-device context.
Similar reference numerals may have been used in different figures to denote similar components.